Machado challenges postmodernity:

aesthetic realism and cynical critique

Abstract

This article critically analyzes postmodernity, understood not as a historical rupture but as an ideological form corresponding to the contradictions of late capitalism. Based on the theoretical contributions of Fredric Jameson
(2000), Jean-François Lyotard (1990), and Robert Kurz (1992), it argues that postmodern thought, by rejecting categories such as totality, historicity, and class struggle, tends to depoliticize theory and obscure the material determinations of social life. In contrast, marxist aesthetics — especially through György Lukács (2010) — are mobilized to reaffirm realism as an artistic form capable of grasping historical movement and revealing the structural conflicts of capitalist society. Within this framework, the works of Machado de Assis are interpreted as a singular expression of critical realism that, through irony, humor, and cynicism, exposes the contradictions of Brazil’s peripheral capitalist modernization in the nineteenth century. The analysis of The Posthumous Memoirs of BrásCubas and Quincas Borba demonstrates how the narrative devices of zynismus and kynismus operate as strategies of social critique. It is concluded that, in the face of postmodern fragmentary postulates, realist literature remains a privileged space for the dispute of narratives and for theoretical confrontations in thinking about the contemporary.